I have known Fiona Sampson since 2006, when she was assigned as my tutor in a second MA I was starting at the time, in Creative and Life Writing, at Goldsmith's College, University of London. Earlier that summer, having just resigned a PhD under Professor Stefan Collini at Cambridge, I sent in a batch of poems to be considered for Poetry Review, where Sampson happened to be editor. I was being, to put it lightly, ambitious. However, at the close of our first group meeting with our tutor later that year in September, as I was about to leave, Sampson mentioned that she had accepted a poem of mine for the forthcoming winter 2006– 2007 issue. I hope the present book serves in some small way as a token of personal gratitude as much as of professional admiration.

As I make clear in the introduction, this book is by no means a work of scholarship in the field of contemporary literary studies. It is a work of sustained literary criticism. And, as a literary critic, my hope is that, for all the baroque sound effects and rhythms of the prose, my judgment in the way I have analysed then synthesized in and through the chapters that make up this book is as lucid as it might be incisive. Yes, the approach is aggressive; but I see no point in merely describing the body of work under study. I chose to study the oeuvre of Professor Sampson, and then write this book, not only because I was a longstanding admirer of her work, but also because I value bodies of writing whose overt signs of high intelligence are palpable and fruitful. The kind that challenge me to find their inner workings, their submerged logic and hidden unities; the kind that challenge me to find ‘ways of going on’ that mirror some of my own tendencies as a meaning- making or meaning- seeing mind. Work, in short, such as Sampson’s, allows me to elicit some inferential load that takes my thinking life forward. I hope the arguments in this book inform, interest, but also ‘take the story forward’, too, for any students or readers of contemporary literature or creative writing.